


Fire and Flames

by heme



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Universe, Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24700894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heme/pseuds/heme
Summary: Initial meeting between Sasori and Deidara. A bit of a character study centred around Sasori.
Relationships: Deidara/Sasori (Naruto)
Kudos: 18





	Fire and Flames

**Author's Note:**

> Oneshot written by the sleepy me that serves as my test for an experimental style. It's been a while since I watched the particular episode associated with this story, slight deviations from the canon narration should be expected. There's a sprinkle of Deidara-bashing in here, but fear not, he's my favourite character.
> 
> SasoDei revival. The dwindle of this fandom is disturbing.
> 
> As always, English is not my native language. Pardon me for any mistakes that happens to come up.
> 
> Comments and feedbacks are always appreciated.
> 
> Enjoy.
> 
> Edit on June 15, 2020: On second thought, "Kuolema tekee taiteilijan" is a better title.  
> Edit on June 16, 2020: Yes, I dislike Nietzsche's philosophy mostly because it fails the game theory benchtest in a catastrophic way. Objectivism is even worse. For further details, see Russell's 'A History of Western Philosophy', even though Russell is heavily overrated at anything except classical logic.

All characters belongs to Masashi, Kishimoto

* * *

_Bloom does the flowers,_  
_Radiating beauty over bowers._  
_There stands,_  
_dianthus,_

_Incomparable._

“Supporting rebel factions through bombing tactics, what are your intentions behind of doing so?”

The appearance of Kisame truly stands up to his name. Gill like markings, equipped with dorsal fins that are normally hidden, shoved into a husk of a human. What would such an abomination of nature be, rising from the old legends of _same-bito_ , if not a demonic shark? Sasori is indeed one to judge, considering that he converted himself into a weird human – puppet hybrid. It seems the time has come for the pot to call the kettle back, once again, and again, and again into infinity. Nevertheless, judging is a part of one’s learning process, only the degree of distinction that one would draw when playing the judge shall mark the difference between its consequent impact.

His words were sweetened with an excessive number of slightly feminine formalities and dampers that would be considered unsuitable for a criminal of his rank. Naturally, the external definition is created by the masses per a silent coordination, and the population average would again naturally associate ‘criminal activities’ along ‘crippling the species’, with a finishing raison d’être of ‘negative’. The only logical outcome is therefore the unrefined will put an equal sign right between ‘criminal’ and ‘crude’. In a sense, the _chambre garnies_ of the half – rotten temple near Iwagakure that the target is kneeling in fits perfectly with the softness spluttered from Kisame’s mouth. Both are gauche and contradictory, and the massive similarity stops there.

Sir Leader’s words sliced through plain air. Seems like he is uttering the mandatory conclusion of the invitation, “Deidara, we would like you to join the Akatsuki.”

There was an annoyed scoff coming from the youngster who was addressed, “The Akatsuki? Sorry, I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Deidara. That was his name.

Dei – da – ra, Sasori let the name of his future partner roll off his mouth.

Dei – da – ra, three frisky syllables stretched out, a hop, a skip, and a final crash between the tip of the tongue and the hard palate. What a flamboyant name, and flamboyant is a perfect descriptor for the impulsive blonde wielding this certain name. Not that this eerie flamboyance would prevent Deidara from continuing not caring about the Akatsuki after Itachi pulls a genjutsu out of his sleeve, of course. One would hazard an uneducated guess that over half of the members in the Akatsuki were forced in, and the exact answer to the number of people that were, should be left to either God, Pein, or Jashin, depending on whom one decides to inquire. Through the action of forcibly tethering an individual with the organisation, it could be said that a connection of the outermost layer of caring is established between the two.

The boy continued, “I only want to focus on my art, the art that I create with my clay!”

This successfully shocked Sasori out of his trance, through the voice of Hiruko, he expressed his amusement as a fellow artist by interrupting Deidara’s monologue on what he deems art, “Art?” Deidara truly deserves an award for actually surprising the stoic redhead, and Sasori in return truly anticipates Deidara’s response.

“When the clay sculptures explode, it makes its existence more sublime!”

Sasori’s previous amusement turned from head to heels faster than the blink of an eye after hearing this outrageous statement.

_Autumn,_  
_winds accompanying._  
_Cold, cutting, empty._  
_Lifeless, the dianthus lay._

Sasori’s life could be summarised under a succinct title: Sasori’s departure.

Departure from his parents.

Departure from his friends.

Departure from Chiyo.

Departure from Sunagakure.

And eventually, departure from humanity. Or that is what he thought, which the rest of the Akatsuki digresses upon. For someone who brandishes the emotionless puppet label all around, he is awfully impatient and quick to anger, and that is exactly what he did inside Hiruko, after being provoked by Deidara’s childish antics with an additional _clin d’ œil_ from the boy.

_Cyclical memories_  
_revisit aged dreams._  
_What haunted their sleep,_  
_shall forever secure._

It all started with the notion of uncertainty.

A brawl between two countries took away the lives of Sasori’s parents, and his remaining direct relative, Chiyo _baa – san_ , decided to keep a white lie.

He used to spam his grandmother with questions regarding the status of mother and father, more precisely about when will they return.

The chances of the wish fulfilled is approximately as much as finding a nymph in the Styx that mother and father has crossed already. In Sasori’s case, an allegory of _Kushinadahime_ being devoured by _Yamata – no – Orochi_ might be more suitable.

Chiyo never directly answered his question.

The more ambiguous sentences are, the wider the confidence interval. The longer the final report takes to come, the more attenuated the original data is. All this contributes to uncertainty.

In the end, Sasori realised that a white lie is still a lie, and mother and father were dead.

Lies are fabrications that acts as noises to truth. The realisation would repetitively haunt Sasori, shifting its form case after case, never bothering to hide its genuine form and spreading melancholy and disgust. It obsessively pestered Sasori with visions that he saw in nightmarish insomnias. Vivisecting this fluid mist amidst its influence is a solid negative, thus Sasori took the alternative: ride the gust of wind towards the heavens. Perhaps, peering the world from top to bottom above the ranks of the hallucinatory mist would gift him with a new sense of revelation.

Only did he arrive in the jaded palaces near Kaguya’s resting place, he felt genuinely cold. It was frigid because of the sheer loneliness.

‘ _L’autre soir un air froid m’alita._ ’ Was this the cause, or the result?

It was too late. He was too late to turn back. The accidental death of his only companion Komushi sealed his fate.

Not wanting Komushi to perish, he moved forward to seek a purpose inside his echochamber.

It was settled: Eternity is Art.

Suna was horrified after sniffing around his endeavours, including his grandmother. Sasori was never a dumb person, it was clear to him that the only reason the Suna higher – ups decided to keep him around was purely political.

To be denied a higher purpose in life is nothing short of dismal.

Art serving this aspiration is doubtlessly cardinal.

A decision is rarely made in a split – second, and for Sasori, his final arrangement was the last piece of the domino set called cognisance.

For much wisdom comes much sorrow, the more knowledge, the more grief.

His history shall be enshrouded by ever – mobile sand dunes stained red with blood from his take – off, hidden under the desert. Never shall it spring up again.

_What has been will be again,_  
_what has been done will be done again;_  
_there is nothing new under the sun._

Underneath the shades inside the caverns of a rock in a desert, a teenager made the final preparations of a procedure.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” Sasori uttered to himself, soothing his body of the upcoming event. Nothing new enforces a sense of certainty: that he was in total control.

“I will become my ultimate art.” He spoke with an unwavering voice, while manipulating a puppet to perform an incision upon his torso. Behind this mask long deemed unbreakable by people who worshipped him with the title _Akasuna – no – Sasori_ lies emptiness and endless sorrow. Sasori knew. And he was determined to fix this. The mechanistic and partisan solution of removing the brain, an organ that is capable of organising emotions, and replacing it by a heart container, an organ that is incapable of comprehending emotions, sounds incredibly tempting from an engineer – cum – artist’s point of view.

The topical anaesthetic worked perfectly. No physical discomfort was felt for damaged skin.

Taking this as a sign of assurance, he continued without regret.

In the end, if only humans were as simple as puppets.

The puppeteer was overjoyed with satisfaction after seeing his ultimate art. Wait – overjoyed, this very word implies that he was still feeling strong emotions. Emotions are brutally human, and this lashes out as a reminder of his humanity. As perfectly expected, this is nothing short of being labelled immediately by Sasori as ridiculous, although the nagging voice welling from the bottom of his heart container was constantly reminding him of the fact that he was still feeling emotions.

Emotions. _Emotions_.

This mere word resembles Sasori’s own poison.

Was the idea of discarding emotions an intoxicating thought, one that tempted Sasori to drift himself off into the world of shallow dreams?

‘I absolutely did not.’ Sasori thought to himself. He is the embodiment of realism, where reality is subject to the heartless governor named science. Through mystical chakra magic, the shinobi world is far callous than science itself because of the clutches of unpredictability. In the end, the one who survives the longest is the winner. Eternity is the answer, one that would not give way under the grinding wheel of natural selection and cultural evolution.

Enter Orochimaru. A Sannin who also left his birth village for higher pursuits.

Sasori found solace within Orochimaru’s broad knowledge of biology and genetics, although none of the pair has brought up the topic of emotions, it spontaneously seeped out from the porous sandstone that acted as the ground of one of Orochimaru’s hideouts, and back into Sasori’s mind.

An artist always seeks to improve their art to the highest standard, and emotions in Sasori’s mind, were a major blemish to his ultimate piece.

Living flesh are dictated by chemical reactions. Hormonal messengers and neurotransmitters instruct the behaviour of animals, the category which humans are not exempt from. He dug out scrolls of research after research, eventually setting his eyes upon groups of people that are diagnosed with the label of being oblivious to emotions. It was written somewhere on another dusty scroll that this condition could be triggered by epigenetic responses to certain chemicals, and one by one, Sasori injected saline solutions of syringes filled with said chemicals into his heart container.

It worked, was the effect statistically significant, or was it a placebo, does not concern Sasori. Orochimaru could have replaced all his medication with saline without Sasori noticing, but to the puppeteer, only results matter. After several months did it become apparent that the effects were nothing permanent, removal of the stimulant will return the genetic expression back to normal.

The comical failure at adjusting his own neurology marked a dent on Sasori’s ego. This serves as one of the contributing factors to his unmitigated distain for humanity, in all its glory of transience and steady – state. Despite the action of associating the creation of an _Übermensch_ with such unadulterated hatred is Nietzschean immature, Sasori adopted this attitude as a masquerade for what he failed to achieve before discovering the wonders of the true versatility beholden inside the human mind.

Oh well. _Ecce homo._

By then, did he truly calm down, rarely if never giving way to emotions.

_Dew water rested on white crowns_  
_of shimmering moonflowers._  
_Fragile, their stems are,_  
_held up by velvety paper._

The snake bastard left after being rejected by Itachi.

To discard the years of trust built between Sasori and Orochimaru in an instant because of Orochimaru’s selfishness, from the ex – Suna nin’s perspective, is an entirely unexpected sudden move. Such a repulsive uproar of uncertainty.

Sir Leader, as Sasori bitterly put it after the argument, Pein – in – the – ass, denied Sasori the option of going solo due to “situation of circumstances”, and the Akatsuki will sought him a new partner immediately. Uncertainty attacked Sasori’s mind once more.

And now, the swirl of uncertainty has already collapsed to a set of solutions, Sasori is stuck here, listening to a blond brat’s blabbering _en plein air_ on his mistaken view he dares to call ‘art’. Impressionism is already bad enough for the elder artist in all its contrast with predetermined outlooks, however, sculptures that reeks of abstract art are intolerable. To the puppeteer, a crass rip – off of the minimalism he has always appreciated in the form of meaningless abstractions are nothing less than horrid. Maybe to the appreciative viewer, those sculptures can be barely considered as art, yet what the brat claims as subliming their aestheticism does nothing but to detach the last drops of artistic intent from the spiritual world.

The redhead attempted to brush off Deidara’s antics as childish histrionic melodrama, the kind that one would perfectly expect from a brat who was never on the receiving end of true loss and the associated raw pain. Somehow, Deidara’s words are irritating Sasori for the whole spectrum that endless is defined as, and the brat has managed to pull out a dull pain within Sasori’s heart container with that outflow of blasphemy. His ears would have been bleeding by now, if they were not made from wood. As if the situation is not horrifying enough, the constant reverberations of what now is _en plein air_ due to the brat’s explosions in his demonstration of his ‘art’ catalysed the spread of pulsing pain around his core of living flesh.

He fiddled with Hiruko by silently tweaking one of its joints while sitting inside as a distraction. Itachi was kind enough to take on the responsibility of handling the little brat, leaving Sasori to chew on his anger.

What does a brat know about art with that misguided and meaningless view of his?

This triggered Sasori, for the brat in all his echochamber of desiring to teach people of the fragility of life through his art, he certainly is not appreciative of life in its truest form.

The most basic need of a living creature is to be living. By living, and living as long as one can, is the correct interpretation of fathoming life itself. No one will be getting anywhere if the contradictory idea of the brat was true.

Itachi ended the fight. The redhead unleashed his boiling anger onto Deidara in a sentence punctuated with distaste, “He is the type to die young.”

In addition to his personal scuffle upon the topic of art, a dead partner will only contribute to the degrees of freedom in his mess of uncertainties, the first thing to do to the brat is to correct his misguided view on art.

_Sights of dusk alters across mountains._  
_Two directions,_  
_upon a moonflower,_  
_is its shape identical?_

On their trip assigned by Sir Leader to one of Orochimaru’s hideouts near Sunagakure, Sasori decided to strike like a venomous scorpion, on point and on time.

“Brat,” he attempted to put this as respectful as possible, “your view on art is wrong.”

Deidara responded with a shit – eating grin that did nothing but only to twang on Sasori’s thin strings of patience, “What’s the matter, un? Transient beauty gone in an instant, giving the pleasure of seeing life and death in a sped – up metamorphosis, that is art!”

This sentence did the job. Sasori whipped out Hiruko’s tail and constricted it around the youngster’s neck and body, and he spat out word by word, “Brat, your view does anything but to be appreciative of the fragility of life. Glorification of death in an obnoxious explosion is nothing artistic. Besides, an explosion is not art, it is terrorism.”

The blonde managed to squeeze out, “So… you must also be an artist? Getting so riled up when someone disagrees with your art, un.”

Sasori did not expect the brat to possess a sharp mind. He released Deidara, and the brat scampered up onto his feet. What a disgusting brat. The puppeteer merely continued without physical threats, “Listen here, brat, art is eternal. Nothing transient, nothing fragile, it is something that sustains the ravages of time. Understood?”

A ‘tch’ was heard as the response, “If art is eternal, it becomes old and stale, un. It gradually loses its beauty, even a stunning artwork will become boring if someone stares it for too long.”

“Nonsense. An artist could always update their old artworks, what defines a piece of art is not its outward appearance, but rather the intentions of the artist behind. This is what I continuously do with my puppets.”

“Well, _Sasori – no – Danna_ ,” Hiruko’s bloodshot eyes widened after hearing the new title, “For all your incorrect views on that art are eternal, I think your last reply makes sense, and I respect your views, un.” At least the brat has a sense of respect for his superiors, and that persuaded Sasori to retract Hiruko’s stinger back into its cavity.

_And I declared that the dead,_  
_who had already died,_  
_are happier than the living,_  
_who are still alive._

_But better than both_  
_is the one who has never been born,_  
_who has not seen evil_  
_that is done under the sun._

The change in landscapes from sparsely populated hills to an acrid wasteland of sand signified that they indeed arrived in Wind country.

Rolling sand dunes reminded Sasori of the intense loneliness that he felt when he was a young Suna – shinobi, and he let his periscope of a mind to wander and recollect his anguished past. Nevertheless, the repulsive face of the effeminate brat materialised from deep below, his subconscious connecting the dots of similarities.

And he was left to ponder, what inspired Deidara to take up art?

Deidara is young, he was not even alive when the third Shinobi world – war occurred, and there had not been any altercations between countries since then, only minor tussles that could be solved by hiring mercenary groups such as the Akatsuki. Sasori has already gotten his hands on Zetsu’s report on Deidara’s background, the brat has no known parents, and grew up in the Explosion Corps near the Third Tsuchikage, Oonoki. His life was privileged; there are no evident loose ends that could provide Sasori with a hint about the truth behind the screens.

Suna was already démodé as it is, with its backwards opinion on art. If Iwa were even more so, which makes perfect sense to Sasori, since the framework of a society is determined by its dominant religion, a child who took up art would be shunned immensely as a stick in the mud. Sasori has fought countless Iwa – shinobi back in the third Shinobi world – war, and it was clear to him from their fighting style that the religious figurehead of Iwagakure is nothing but Oonoki, the epitome of stubbornness.

The driving force behind Deidara’s artistic pursuits are starting to become clear, with a simple coherent answer: loneliness.

‘ _L’autre soir un air froid m’alita_.’ In this occasion, it is the cause, which was then further activated by Deidara’s manic tendencies.

Being treated as a weapon by their birth village without the capabilities of intelligent thought and discourse is nothing short of humiliating.

That is why, they fled, leaving a trail of blood as a protest.

For all they disagree with themselves in their limbo, their surroundings conditioned them into who they are.

With surprisingly similar results.

Only then, they shall realise, the Shinobi world is never one for art.


End file.
